The present invention relates to measuring the thickness of body fat. More specifically, the present invention includes a method and apparatus for non-invasively determining body fat thickness using infrared light.
In today's health conscious world, people are becoming aware fitness involves more than maintaining proper body weight as indicated by a bathroom scale. Muscle tissue is heavier, and generally more desirable than fat tissue, but a scale treats their weights the same. It is necessary to determine the amount of body fat to get an accurate indication of total fitness.
Body fat has been measured using many different techniques. By immersing a body in water, its total fat composition can be determined. A simpler technique involves measuring the thickness of fat at various locations on the body using a skinfold caliper. Unfortunately, accurate results with a skinfold caliper require not only consistent operation of the calipers, but also require a second person to take the measurements in locations where the person being measured cannot readily see the caliper reading if attempting to do the measurement on him or herself.
The measurement of fat layer thicknesses is also important to the meat packaging industry, with the result that various methods have been used to measure fat on animals. However, many of the fat measurement techniques used in that industry are invasive and thus inappropriate for fitness measurement purposes. For example, Shigeo Tauchi et al. Japanese laid-open patent application No. 56-160622 describes using colored filters to optically determine the fat thickness for a butchered cross section of meat, and Knudsen et al U.S. Pat. No. 3,671,858 discloses a method of using a needle having electrical contacts to measure electrical resistances between various layers of flesh.
Yoshio Takemori Japanese laid-open application No. 60-181606, Hiroyuki Toyokawa Japanese laid-open application No. 62-156508, and Stouffer U.S. Pat. No. 4,785,817 each disclose a noninvasive method of measuring fat thickness using ultrasonic waves.